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Having one drink makes you attractive

Simon de Bruxelles

March 5 2015, 12:01am, The Times

Would the chancellor be more attractive after one drink?Kirsty Wigglesworth/Getty Images

Finding someone more attractive after enjoying an alcoholic drink or two has long been known as the “beer goggles” effect. Now researchers have discovered that it works in reverse too, so that people who have had a drink become more alluring to others.

The effect only works up to a point, though. Researchers at Bristol University photographed the faces of 40 students when they were sober, then after they had had one drink and finally after two. The pictures were placed beside each other and sober assessors were asked to rate the attractiveness of the drinker at various stages of inebriation.

Subjects were invariably rated more attractive after one drink, compared with when they had had none, while the sober picture was rated more attractive…

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